Flann O'Brien : problems with authority
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Bibliographic Information
Flann O'Brien : problems with authority
Cork University Press, 2017
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 298-314) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
With its penchant for dissecting rehearsed attitudes and subverting expectations, Flann O'Brien's writing displays an uncanny knack for comic doubling and self-contradiction. Focusing on the satirical energies and anti-authoritarian temperament invested in his style, Flann O'Brien: Problems with Authority interrogates the author's clowning with linguistic, literary, legal, bureaucratic, political, economic, academic, religious and scientific powers in the sites of the popular, the modern and the traditional. By taking O'Brien's riotous clashes with diverse manifestations of authority as an entry point, the volume draws together disparate elements of the writer's work. Each chapter reflects on some aspect of his iconoclastic impulses; on the impertinent send-ups of pretension and orthodoxy to be found in his fiction, columns, and writing for stage and screen; on the very nature of his comedic inspiration.... Among the topics addressed are O'Brien's satirical use of the pseudonym, the clich' and the Irish language; his irreverent repackaging of inherited myths, sacred texts and formative canons; and his refusal of literary and ideological closure.The emerging picture is of a complex literary project that is always, in some way, a writing against the weight of received wisdoms and inherited sureties. Together, these essays invite us to reconsider O'Brien's profile as, at once, a local comedian, a critic of provincial attitudes, a formal innovator and an inimitable voice in the twentieth-century avant-garde. Most pressingly, Flann O'Brien: Problems with Authority compels us to consider the many ways in which O'Brien's texts bring into sharp relief the kinship between comic genius and an anti-authoritarian temperament.
Table of Contents
Editors' introduction RUBEN BORG, PAUL FAGAN, JOHN MCCOURTPART I 'neither popular nor profitable': O'Nolan vs. The Plain People'irreverence moving towards the blasphemous': Brian O'Nolan, Blather and Irish popular culture CAROL TAAFFE'No more drunk, truculent, witty, celtic, dark, desperate, amorous paddies!': Brian O'Nolan and the Irish stereotype MAEBH LONGLamhd laftar and bad language: bilingual cognition in Cruiskeen Lawn MARIA KAGER'the half-said thing': Cruiskeen Lawn, Japan and the Second World War CATHERINE FLYNNPhysical comedy and the comedy of physics in The Third Policeman, The Dalkey Archive and Cruiskeen Lawn KATHERINE EBURYPART II. Mixed inks: O'Nolan vs. his peers'widening out the mind': Flann O'Brien's 'wide mind' between Joyce's 'mental life' and Beckett's 'deep within' DIRK VAN HULLEPhwat's in a nam?: Brian O'Nolan as a Late Revivalist RONAN CROWLEYFantastic economies: Flann O'Brien and James Stephens R. W. MASLENThe ideal and the ironic: incongruous Irelands in An Beal Bocht, No Laughing Matter and Ciaran O Nuallain's Oige an Dearthar IAN O CAOIMHMore 'gravid' than gravitas: Collopy, Fahrt and the Pope in Rome JOHN MCCOURTPART III. Gross impieties: O'Nolan vs. the sacred texts'a scholar manque'?: further notes on Brian O Nuallain's engagement with Early Irish literature LOUIS DE PAORIn defence of 'gap-worded' stories: Brian O'Nolan on authority, reading and writing ALANA GILLESPIEReading Flann with Paul: modernism and the trope of conversion RUBEN BORGThe Dalkey Archive: a Menippean satire against authority DIETER FUCHS'walking forever on falling ground': closure, hypertext and the textures of possibility in The Third Policeman TAMARA RADAK
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